Engineers in America: Too Young, Too Old

When trying to hire engineers, do you find that they either have too little or too much experience?

In Breaking the $300B Barrier: State of Semiconductor Industry, I discussed the state of the semiconductor industry in general. Today, I'd like like to start a discussion on the apparent aging of the engineerings in the US market. This is far from scientific research, so I am taking some leniency on the subject.

Three different events occurred recently that brought this subject to the forefront for me. First, I noticed a trend when trying to hire replacement engineers for several positions. Prior to the 2009 crash, we at EAG hired a group of engineers for application development. This is basically a hardware/software engineer who designs and develops hardware, software and applications, so they need a good mix of skills. The applicants were many and there was a large pool of qualified candidates with different levels of experience in the industry.

We retained most of the talent during the downturn in 2009, then started a slow hiring program in 2010 to 2012. We tried to target an experience level of five to 10 years for some senior positions. We asked for some specific experience on one of the large semiconductor test platforms. We were surprised by the applicants. Instead of getting resumes with the level of experience we were looking for, we received either foreign students looking for a sponsor or senior level engineers with over 20 years of experience. We polled a number of our customers to see if they had any candidates and the response was basically the same.

This experience has repeated several times, leaving me to wonder where the good, young engineers were to replace the present workforce. When our company changed focus and looked for an embedded development engineer, we did get a better pick from the experience pool, partly because it seemed like a growing field, with less maturity. Still, the experience level was strongly biased towards the two ends -- either no experience or over 20 years of experience.

The final piece of evidence came at the GSA event held recently in Silicon Valley. The median age appeared to be in the late 50s, and youngsters were those in their 40s. Now it should be noted that this tends to be an event with more senior management types, but it is a bit concerning. I worry about what is left behind and who is going to take over the innovation and drive the industry forward.

It could just be that we have heard for so long that everything is moving to Asia, that it has discouraged many of our young people from studying engineering. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. CEOs complain about lack of talent, and at the same time state that they are going to Asia. Where is the incentive for the younger generation? While this seems to affect the test and application development field more than some of the newer fields, there does appear to be a general aging trend. This leads to the question, who will be there to pick up the slack once us grey hairs leave? My hope is the new STEM push will help infuse some much needed new blood into the US engineering stream. Please let me know your thoughts and ideas.

I am not sharing that vision. If engineering school were easy your postulate would be correct. You still need to have the intellect and interest to succeed. It's not like the degree would be handed to them. Even if your idea were true (and I don't think it is) having a ready pool of engineers is never a bad thing. They tend to be pretty good at most anything they try to do.......well except maybe modern dance.

If businesses were that forward thinking, they'd create such incentives and that would flod the market with engineers. Oversupply would cause engineering salaries to drop and the businesses would make back their investments and maybe even profit. But, the time for ROI is a minimum four years, more like 10+. Stockholders don't want to wait that long.

Try to remember kids, its a never ending race to the bottom (i.e. the Walmart model). Maximizing profits at every turn. In short, it's modern business and in their lexicon there is no word for "enough".

If the government and industry were serious about fixing this problem, why isn't there large incentives for kids to go into engineering? Partial or total tuition subsidies for example. The promise of a job at graduation. Realistically, we do it for farmers who grow stuff we don't need (e.g. corn). So why not invest in something that helps the future of the country?

I would agree that a big part of the problem is that hardware does not seem sexy enough anymore. The entire semi-conductor field is just not as sexy as it used to be. As it contijnues to become more and more of a commodity it makes it more difficult to sell to the new negeration, and I am not sure I blame them. What would we do in their shoes?

The 25-35 year old engineer is not doing test or semi or embedded. They do Java, Python, database, web front ends and mobile, Android and iOS. That is what the cool kids were doing when they graduated, so that is their expeince.

And therein lies the problem. Hardware isn't cool. Makes we wonder what you call a "tech" job. I read about how NYC is becoming a tech center, but it's all for the programmers you mention here. So what is "tech" anyway?

In some businesses, 10 years experience is considered senior. A software engineer friend in his early 40s is the most senior person in his department by far. He's surrounded by 20-something programmers who work 18 hours a day because they have no family to go home to every night.

We have always been able to find engineers, even if it took longer than expected. It has been rare for us to have anyone turn down an offer, compensation is actually more of an issue for us to retain talent than to bring in new talent.